Data gathering on all Indians seen as key to alleviating poverty

WASHINGTON – Could a semi-Orwellian program to collect biometric data for 1.3 billion Indians become a key tool to pulling people out of extreme poverty and integrating them into the global economy? The world’s largest democracy is betting that it will, and that it could offer important benefits in poorer countries around the world.

In this case, Big Brother has a name. It is Nandan Nilekani, Indian technology entrepreneur and now chairman of the Unique Identification Authority of India — an agency collecting fingerprints and iris scans of all Indians and assigning them a unique identification number in a massive database in the cloud.

This is not, Nilekani says, a scary example of government intrusion.

Suddenly, Nilekani said, tens of millions of people born without a birth certificate or any formal registration will “exist” in the eyes of the government — and can demand services and benefits, get a mobile phone or open a bank account. Putting all the data on the cloud, he said, breaks the monopoly of civil servants over the distribution of such things as food and fuel subsidies.

Once a person is in the database, his identity can be verified at any government office, distributed from a bank or transferred automatically to a bank account. It’s efficient. It cuts down on opportunities for corruption or what economists call “rent-seeking,” the skim off the top an official might demand for delivering a service.

It vests people in the system — so much so that the roughly 30,000 registration sites Nilekani’s agency has established around India are registering a startling 1 million people a day. More than 300 million have been registered since the effort began, and the aim is to have half the population in the database within about a year.

In developed nations, “identity happens when a child is born; it is a basic document,” Nilekani said, whereas in India half of births are not registered. “It’s a serious handicap. Unique identification is a means to empowerment.”

At the Washington-based Center for Global Development, experts are studying how Nilekani’s system — and technology and biometrics generally — might speed development.

Having a basic way to verify identity does not just change the dynamics between citizen and government, it also could encourage companies to set up, for example, health insurance systems in a given area because they are able to authenticate a policyholder’s identity.

It’s also a real example of how steady advances in computing power are changing the nature of how governments do business.

The exercise involves collecting and manipulating massive amounts of data. To ensure that a person’s biometric information is not duplicated, Nilekani said, the Indian government chose to take prints from all 10 fingers and scans of both eyes — enough data from each individual to guarantee “uniqueness across a billion people.”

But consider this: Each time a person registers, his or her data have to be compared with everything in the system to be sure the person did not register elsewhere.

The technology did not even exist five years ago.

Nilekani plays down any privacy issues. There is only basic information in the database: the biometrics, a name, gender and date of birth. Agencies or businesses that build applications using the database are responsible for their data security.

It is not clear how law enforcement figures into the mix — whether a fingerprint pulled from a crime scene, for example, could be run against the database.

But Nilekani appears less like an architect of “The Matrix” and more like an immigration agent, ushering people into the modern world. “People are coming from the nonexistent to the organized world,” he said. “It’s a modern-day Ellis Island.”